I have a bit of a strange relationship with cheap ebooks.
It's a bit of a love hate one. Time and time the promise of a book for 99p
sucks me in and much of the time I'm disappointed in the quality. But I keep
going back, the optimist in me (whoever that optimist is) keeps thinking, some
of them must be good.
Fair enough, there's cheap and there's cheap. Completely
free ebooks generally do reflect the quality of the writing and I've never got
a freebie that I liked. Reduced price books can be fantastic, introducing new
authors and drumming up some publicity but I do have some issues with cheap
ebooks generally. I imagine they are cheaper to make and distribute than a
paper book so the lower price is understandable. However, does this mean that
now there is a lower threshold quality-wise for becoming published. I also
question if a book is this cheap, who does the money go to. Hmm. I don't know
enough about the book trade to shed any light on this but it's something I'm
giving a bit more thought to recently.
This book was 99p and it's one of the better ones. I read it
to the end which says a lot, some books don't even warrant that! Beautiful is a
crime thriller and the first point of note is that the beginning is quite
shocking and upsetting. Blood and gore has never bothered me but this did, it
involves a child being raped and we're spared no details regarding the
aftermath. I'm not sure how I feel about this, whether the detail gives us the
level of discomfort we should rightly feel when reading about a rape, or whether
it tips over into shock tactics for the sake of it. It seemed a little 'misery
memoir' in style at this point although it's fiction.
I also had some issues with the portrayal of the main
character, the survivor of rape. It's always going to be impossible to portray
the myriad of feelings a human being could have after a traumatic experience but
I'm not sure that this helps the way survivors can be seen. Saying any more
would spoil the book if you want to read this but if you do, perhaps you'll see
where I'm coming from.
What I did find interesting is the setting, beginning in the
1950s. Attitudes to children and their treatment then were very different and I
think the writer managed to show this accurately. We wouldn't consider a child
victim of rape 'ruined' these days or pretty much just let her go on her way without a bit more
help than the character in this book gets.
It's well written and at a good pace but one thing that
consistently irritated me was the formatting. This is often an issue with
ebooks. In this one, there were no breaks within chapters where one scene ended
and another began. This was very
confusing, you'd have two characters having a conversation and then you'd
wonder why suddenly it was two different characters talking about something
completely different. Argh. Just a few nice spaces within the chapter would be
nice. There's probably a technical term for this but, well, I'm not technical.
So spaces it is.
The first half of the book was more enjoyable for me,
probably because I always enjoy reading about children and care about what
happens to them. I can't say that I found many of the characters terribly
likeable but they were believable and suitably flawed. Towards the end I
started to speed up my reading a I felt that events were being rather dragged
out. Again, some cheap ebooks don't seem
to have had the eye of an experienced editor. Anyway, it's worth a read if
you're in the mood for a cheap thriller, particularly if you enjoy a one that's
set in the past.
It's only fair to say though that I'm not an experienced
reviewer. I tend to be long winded, need a bit of editing and I'm not the best
at formatting. So expect me to have a 99p ebook out soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment